Category Archives: Urban Schools

A couple weeks ago I reminded you that Colorado’s public school open enrollment season is fast approaching, and mentioned a series of school choice expos hosted by Denver Public Schools (DPS). As it turns out, Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin attended one of the expos and filed an interesting report about “The Middle School Freak Out” (H/T Ed News Colorado). Sometimes it’s easy for policy wonks like my friends in the Education Policy Center to focus on the abstract — the numbers and the philosophical debates. A story like Brundin’s, with interviews of students and parents, quickly reminds you that policy changes like expanded choice within DPS have ramifications sometimes not considered. Sure, it means various families have more educational options, but what does that look like in real life? Choice can be empowering and liberating, but it’s also messy sometimes. The Public Radio story shines a light on the special distress that often accompanies the transition from elementary to middle school. (I’m not even close to being there yet, so don’t ask me what it’s all about.) Some families avoided the dilemma by enrolling students years before into one of the growing number of Colorado’s K-8 schools. But for […]

One thing December brings is the obligatory year-end lists. If you are even a casual reader of this blog, then you should be interested in taking a moment to vote on the “Best and Worst in American Education, 2011” — brought to you by the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. Being of a decidedly reform-minded bent, the group has offered up some expected developments in their five choices for each of the “Best” and “Worst” categories. Most of the items I’ve covered at one time or another during 2011. Naturally I can’t make you vote for any particular events (or even vote at all), but I am making some strong suggestions that fans could select on my behalf as one of the most inexpensive Christmas gifts you’ve ever purchased. This is my blog, and I like to save the best for last. So which of the five choices should you recognize as the worst education event of 2011?

The Brookings Institution has released a new “Education Choice and Competition Index” (ECCI) to rate the availability of schooling options for families in the nation’s 25 largest school districts (H/T Eduwonk). RiShawn Biddle has a great breakdown of the index’s strengths and shortcomings, including the need for a clearer picture of the quality of choices and an expansion to cover more districts. Expanding to the 100 largest districts, as Biddle urges, would include some of Colorado’s own. I’m pretty sure Denver Public Schools would do well on the ECCI, given the commitment to expanding charter and innovation school options. Interestingly, the Denver Post featured a piece yesterday about how DPS schools are increasing their efforts to market themselves to parents.

Update, 11/23: Ed News Colorado reports some more good news about the new DPS enrollment system: “Until recently it was uncertain whether all of the 35 charter schools in the DPS system would take part in SchoolChoice. The district now has a commitment from every charter to participate.” The holiday season is upon us. I can practically smell the Thanksgiving feast a couple days away, and then the anticipation builds and builds and builds for Christmas! But your intrepid little Eddie is always looking ahead. For many school districts in Colorado, the month of January is open enrollment period — the time when students and parents can apply to get into a school outside their neighborhood for the coming school year. (Some deadlines come earlier than others: Douglas County parents have only until January 5 for their first-round application.) Last time I checked into it, the trend of Colorado families taking advantage of open enrollment was still growing. And there’s no reason to believe it has changed.

Once upon a time I pointed readers to an interesting and thought-provoking article by education guru Rick Hess, titled “Does School Choice Work?” A couple of points Hess made in the article can stand to be repeated. First: The biggest mistake pro-market school reformers have made can thus be put simply: They have mistaken choice for competition. The conviction that school choice constitutes, by itself, a market solution has too often led reformers to skip past the hard work necessary to take advantage of the opportunities that choice-based reform can provide. One of his steps to help advance the choice agenda?: It is not essential for every single consumer to have the knowledge or inclination to make savvy decisions — but providers do need to expect that the quality of their performance will be known, and will matter. Today, unfortunately, it is enormously difficult for parents in most communities to get useful information on school quality….There is a gaping need for third parties to step up and play the role of a Zagat’s guide or Consumer Reports, providing accessible, independent information on K-12 schools. As these examples make clear, there is absolutely value in having multiple providers, perhaps focusing on […]

A Friday quick hit from Pennsylvania… It is noteworthy to see a career public educator, recently retired as superintendent of one of the nation’s largest school districts, go public in her support for expanded school choice not only through charter schools, but vouchers as well. I’m talking about former Philadelphia superintendent Arlene Ackerman, whose new online column is worth the read — if for no other reason than its refreshing perspective: Meaningful education reform must be forced upon the system from outside by giving parents of all income levels real choices about where their children go to school. That requires giving parents comprehensive school choice that includes an expanded charter-school system and a voucher program for low-income parents with children trapped in a failing school. The debate about improving failing urban schools has raged for decades, but solutions have been unacceptably slow in coming. Unless progress in student achievement accelerates, it will be 2123 before all children are at grade level in reading and math. During that time, we will continue to lose an increasing percentage of African American and Latino males to the criminal-justice system and an increasing percentage of Philadelphians will be sentenced to a permanent underclass requiring […]

Yesterday Denver-based and national researchers released the big evaluation of Denver’s ProComp teacher incentive pay program, often considered the centerpiece of an array of structural reforms in Colorado’s second largest school district. If you want the soundbite summary of the work by the University of Colorado Denver and the Center for Education Data and Research, Ed News Colorado’s report nearly nails it: Student achievement is up and teacher turnover is down since Denver Public Schools implemented its merit pay plan for teachers in 2006, but it’s tough to prove a direct link between the two. In other words, ProComp (not best understood as “merit pay”) almost certainly is having a positive impact on student results in classrooms across Denver, though real world conditions make it very difficult to pin down the effects of one element when many reforms are taking place. My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow summarized similar observations made from a 2010 ProComp evaluation in his issue paper Pioneering Teacher Compensation Reform. Of course, there’s not a magical direct line between having a system like ProComp in place and better student test results. Evaluators observed some improvements in instructional practices, and as was noted in the Ed […]

A couple days ago I shared with you my amusement at a Denver Post headline and story that injected the rumor of “vouchers” into the board race for Colorado’s largest school district: Jefferson County. What about the state’s second-largest district? Well, the big story over at Ed News Colorado right now is “Vouchers a tricky issue in DPS race”: When a newly-formed committee called Latinos for Education Reform placed ads in several community newspapers criticizing the records of both [Denver Public Schools board incumbent Arturo] Jimenez and board member Andrea Merida – who is not up for re-election this year – the Jimenez campaign initially complained of “race-baiting.” But Jimenez followed that with a newsletter to supporters claiming LFER is misrepresenting itself and that its ads “are being pushed by pro-voucher individuals and special-interest groups,” making reference to “radical pro-voucher activists from Douglas County.”

Last week I shared with you an update about the Harrison School District’s forward-thinking teacher compensation system. Led by superintendent Mike Miles, the Colorado Springs-area district is one of the few in the state, or even in the nation, to completely discard the old salary schedule and its rigid payment of teachers based on years of experience and graduate course credits. The timing of my update turns out to be really good. This morning I found out that a school district in Michigan, of all places, is pushing forward with a plan to pay its 60 teachers more like attorneys and less like blue-collar factory workers: Suttons Bay Public Schools has achieved a rarity – a teachers union contract that pays teachers for performance and not seniority. While most every other Michigan district has a salary schedule that gives automatic raises to teachers for every year they work, Suttons Bay approved a four-year contract that groups teachers based upon performance, starting in the 2012-2013 school year…. “This is a vast improvement over the factory model compensation system used in nearly every school district throughout the country,” [Mackinac Center for Public Policy education policy director Michael] Van Beek wrote in an […]

From the files of “I’m glad s/he’s not my state legislator,” we turn to the state of Michigan — where lawmakers are considering a plan to give families greater choice through mandatory public school open enrollment. A recent Associated Press story highlights some of the outrageous rhetoric from the opposition: State Rep. Timothy Bledsoe, a Democrat from Grosse Pointe, said he’s worried that a mandatory schools of choice program would be the “death blow” to local control of schools. “If your school board cannot control its boundaries and who is allowed to attend your schools, there just isn’t much left that Lansing can’t determine,” Bledsoe said. “The school board is left to hire and fire the superintendent and that’s about it.” A pretty silly argument all in all. Mandatory open enrollment essentially means no school can keep out students based on where they live, as long as there is a seat open and the school doesn’t have to create a special program or accommodation just for that student. Public school choice leader Colorado has mandatory open enrollment — one of the nation’s strongest open enrollment laws, in fact. In 2010-11, about 66,000 students attended a public school outside their district […]